Overview of Maclean's Triune Brain & Emotional Development in Children, Apuntes de Desarrollo de Personalidad

¡Descarga Overview of Maclean's Triune Brain & Emotional Development in Children y más Apuntes en PDF de Desarrollo de Personalidad solo en Docsity! DESARROLLO SOCIAL Y DE LA PERSONALIDAD LESSON 1: The beginning of social life Paul Maclean and the triune brain: MacLean proposed that the most ancient “reptilian brain” is composed of the basal ganglia, is involved in basic species-typical behaviours such as aggression, dominance, and ritualistic displays, and is present in all vertebrates. According to MacLean, the “paleomammalian/visceral brain” arose early in mammalian evolution and is involved in emotion and motivational drive required for offspring care, reproduction, and feeding. Lastly, MacLean proposed that the “neo mammalian brain,” or the neocortex, which arose later in mammalian evolution, is more developed and complex in “higher” mammals, specifically primates and humans, and underlies higher order cognition and intelligence (MacLean, 1985). The indirect mayor contribution by MacLean was stating that evolutionary changes to the brain, and the adaptation of new circuits and specializations, do not occur in isolation but rather are embedded into ancestral systems. Social brain hypothesis: • The social brain hypothesis was proposed as an explanation for the fact that primates have unusually large brains for body size compared to all other vertebrates: Primates evolved large brains to manage their unusually complex social systems. Humans have the largest brain (bigger frontal lobe) size due to the managing of complex social relationships. • Although this proposal has been generalized to all vertebrate taxa as an explanation for brain evolution, recent analyses suggest that the social brain hypothesis takes a very different form in other mammals and birds than it does in anthropoid primates. 1 DESARROLLO SOCIAL Y DE LA PERSONALIDAD • In primates, there is a quantitative relationship between brain size and social group size (group size is a monotonic function of brain size), presumably because the cognitive demands of sociality place a constraint on the number of individuals that can be maintained in a coherent group. 1.1 CHILDHOOD IN HISTORY  ¿Do you think that the childhood has been always a differentiated special period? The context of childhood through history is the following one: - Contemporary Western societies can be described as "child-centered" (money, care, etc.). - Childhood and adolescence have not always been considered sensitive and special periods. 2 DESARROLLO SOCIAL Y DE LA PERSONALIDAD o At the end of the nineteenth century raised laws to restrict child labour and to make schools. o Teens begin to spend much more time with their peers of the same age and separated from adults. o Cultures of peers are created and begin to be considered as a distinct class of individuals who have left childhood but are not yet ready for adulthood. o After the World War II, the rise of university education delayed the entry into the world of work (extended adolescence). o Many cultures do not have the concept of adolescence (such as Eskimos). 1.2 EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT Charles Darwin, whose 1872 book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals argued that humans and primates have an inborn, universal set of emotional expressions —a view consistent with today's evolutionary approach to development. Carroll Izard suggests that infants are born with an innate repertoire of emotional expressions. In fact, these basic facial expressions are remarkably similar across the most diverse cultures. Whether we look at babies in India, the United States, or the jungles of New Guinea, the expression of basic emotions is the same. Jose Miguel Fernández-Dols conducted a study in Papua New Guinea that suggests facial expressions of emotions are not universal. By recognizing spontaneous facial expressions of emotions in a small-scale society inside this country, he discovered that:  Infants displayed a fairly wide range of emotional expressions.  Although infants displayed similar kind of emotions, the degree of emotional expressivity varies among different types of children.  Children in different cultures show reliable differences in emotional expressiveness, even during infancy or childhood. The advances in infants’ emotional life are made possible by the increasing sophistication of their brains and way of thinking. By the age of nine or ten months, the structures that make up the limbic system (place for emotional reactions to happen) are beginning to grow. The limbic system starts to work in tandem with the frontal lobe structures, allowing for an increased range of emotions to appear. At birth, babies show emotions as interest, distress, disgust, and contentment. By the end of the second month of birth, babies begin to display social smiles that are most often seeing in interactions with caregivers. In addition, other basic emotions that emerged between two and seven months are: anger, sadness, joy, surprise, and fear. These primary 5 DESARROLLO SOCIAL Y DE LA PERSONALIDAD emotions may be biologically programmed because they emerge in all healthy infants at roughly the same ages and are displayed and interpreted similarly in all cultures. In the second year of birth, infants begin to display much more complex emotions as embarrassment, shame, guilty, envy and pride. These feelings are sometimes called the self- conscious emotions because each one involves some damage or enhancement of our sense of the self. Michel Lewis and these associates (1989) believe that embarrassment, the simplest self- conscious emotion, will not emerge until the child can recognise her/himself in a mirror or a photograph (Theory of mind). Self-evaluative emotions such as shame, guilty and pride may require both self-recognition (for example, the child can recognize himself in a mirror or a photograph) and an understanding of rules and standards of evaluating one’s conduct, and that requires being conscious about people who surrounds and interacts with them. Preschool children may also show evaluative embarrassment, characterized by nervous smiles, self-touching, and gaze aversion, when they fail to complete a task in the allotted time or to otherwise match a standard. Evaluative embarrassment stems from a negative evaluation of one’s performance and is much more stressful than the “simple” embarrassment of being the object of others’ attention (Lewis & Ramsay, 2002). Some investigators make clear distinctions between shame and guilt.  Guilt implies that we have in some way failed to live up to our obligations to other people.  Shame is more self-focused and is not based on a concern for others. Theory of mind: Example: Elysa, 8 months old, crawls past the full-length mirror that hangs on a door in her parents' bedroom. She barely pays any attention to her reflection as she moves by. On the 6 DESARROLLO SOCIAL Y DE LA PERSONALIDAD other hand, her cousin Brianna, who is almost 2 years old, stares at herself in the mirror as she passes and laughs as she notices, and then rubs off, a smear of jelly on her forehead. Theories of mind are the explanations that children use to explain how others think. What are infants’ thoughts when trying to think? According to developmental psychologist John Flavell, infants begin to understand certain things about their own and others’ mental processes at a quite early age. Another piece of evidence for infants' growing sense of mental activity is that by the age of 2, infants begin to demonstrate the rudiments of empathy. Empathy is an emotional response that corresponds to the feelings of another person. At 24 months of age, infants sometimes comfort others or show concern for them. In order to do this, they need to be aware of the emotional states of others. Further, during their second year, infants begin to use deception, both in games of "pretend" and in outright attempts to fool others. When do infants start regulating their own’s emotions? In the first few months of life, it is caregivers who regulate babies’ emotional arousal by controlling their exposure to events likely to overstimulate them, and by rocking, stroking, holding, singing, or providing pacifiers to their over aroused infants. But by the middle of the first year, babies are making some progress at regulating their negative emotions. Six-months-old babies, for example, do manage to reduce at least some of their negative arousal by turning their bodies away from unpleasant stimuli or by seeking objects to suck, such as their thumbs or a pacifier. By the end of the first year, infants develop additional strategies for reducing negative arousal such as rocking themselves, chewing on objects, or moving away from people or events that upset them. When do infants recognize and interpret emotions? Social Referencing implies the use of others’ emotional expressions to infer the meaning of otherwise ambiguous situations. Developmentalists who investigate these issues believe that achieving emotional competence is crucial to children’s social competence, that is, their ability to achieve personal goals in social interactions while continuing to maintain positive relationships with others. 2. TEMPERAMENT Refers to how children behave, as opposed to what they do or why they do it. Infants show temperamental differences in general disposition from the time of birth, largely due initially to genetic factors, and temperament tends to be fairly stable well into adolescence. 7